those spells suck ass. to max them out takes way to much experience. its over fifty thousand points for the last level, and when ur casting them your left exposed to your enemies attacks, u could use shield but the drain on your mana is already pretty taxing. they consume to much resourses to be worth it. simple is best, lightning fireball and shield

Maxed out it does 40 damage about 4 times per second, a quick bit of math will reveal that means that it does 160 damage per second for about 10 seconds, in the end it comes out to 1600 damage, and the fact that it affects all enemies in 10 yard range or so can't really be ignored, for instance I've dealt out the full damage to a group of 12 balverines surrounding me, equating to 19,200 damage dealt out in ten seconds, not a bad deal at all considering it only uses up the same amount of mana as the Enflame spell, and quite frankly, if you find that highly mana taxing you must not have done much in the way of magic upgrades, as it's rather easy to use it ten times or so with a magic power level of only 3 without needing to use a potion.

All that said for its positives, it does have its fair share of drawbacks, for instance, it takes three seconds to warm up, which, if you're bad at timing, can be crippling if you haven't looked into physical durability. Its other, and far more serious flaw is that if you take an enemy out entirely the enemy is utterly annhilated, either smited by the heavens (Divine Fury) or dragged to hell (Infernal Wrath), and while you'll get the items, you give up any experience you would have gained. In addition, it's a situational spell, when surrounded it's downright amazing, whereas against one or two enemies it's overkill, and much more annoying than the mana drain (again, assuming you upped it earlier) is the warm up and cool down (if it's a weak enemy you'll probably have a few extra seconds of blasting at the end.

In short, it's a conditional thing, it can be good, or it can be one of the worst spells in the game, all depending on how you use it.

Pure Mages are very hard to do, make sure you max out fireball, it's pretty good.

Being Pure Mage is not hard at all. With a mana augmentation or two, and the spell Physical Sheild, you can be practicly invisible with a few mana potions! And if you use a good mix of attack spells and defensive spells, you can own most enemies pretty quickly. I was pure mage once (no weapons at all), and only the beginning was any hard.